Getting to the All-Star Weekend is extremely tough. It takes a lot of hard work, skill, determination and a sacrifice of things that you might want to do in order to become the person you need to be. I'm sure it's also really hard for basketball players to become so talented and focused as athletes to eventually be named or voted onto the All-Star teams, too.

Finding my way to All-Star Weekend here was not easy. I was supposed to take a flight from Minneapolis into Chicago on Thursday afternoon and then make a connecting flight three hours later to end up in Houston just in time to catch the majority of the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder battling it out on national television. The first part of that trip was a breeze. The second part had me wondering if O'Hare Airport in Chicago was quickly morphing itself into a Stephen King novel of some sort.

After waiting my three hours, the plane that we were supposed to take to Houston still wasn't at the gate. It was in a hangar, and the crew was waiting for it to be taxied to our gate. After about 25 minutes of when we were supposed to be boarding the plane, it was finally brought to where it was supposed to be. Then they announced the plane was too hot. It had a fever or an internal temperature of 85 degrees and needed to be cooled manually. One problem with that: the manual system of cooling the plane revealed a mechanical problem, and that had to be fixed.